Tuesday, the USDA released its weekly planting progress report. Progress in corn planting is extremely behind last year’s record pace. Only 2% of the crop was planted last week, and 9% of the corn crop is already in the ground for the 18 primary producing states. This compares to a 5 year historical average of [...]
Signal: agricultural losses
See Sherwood et al. 2011.
India’s mango crop burned up in extreme heat wave linked to climate change
Alphonso, the king of mangoes, has fallen victim to climate change. The state government’s preliminary estimate is that nearly 80% of the mango crop has been destroyed, said agriculture minister Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil. “The trees flowered far in excess of everyone’s expectations. The devastation has taken us by surprise. I am told it is because of [...]
Egyptian protests fueled by sky-high food prices driven up by climate change
The throngs of protestors in the streets of Cairo this week have a host of grievances. There are the decades of authoritarian rule of course, and the lack of political expression or economic opportunity. But the uprising grew in part out of protests against high food prices. Food price inflation in Egypt was over 20 [...]
China bracing for worst drought in 200 years
The United Nations’ food agency issued an alert on Tuesday warning that a severe drought was threatening the wheat crop in China, the world’s largest wheat producer, and resulting in shortages of drinking water for people and livestock. China has been essentially self-sufficient in grain for decades for national security reasons. Any move by China [...]
World food prices at all-time high due to extreme weather
The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization said last week that world food prices hit a record high in January, driven by huge increases in the prices of wheat, corn, sugar and oils. And prices are expected to keep rising in the coming months. That’s bad news for consumers and governments. Surging prices in 2007 [...]
2010 extreme weather in China cost $75 billion, 4800 lives
Song Lianchun, chief of the National Climate Center, said extreme weather last year caused the deaths of more than 4,800 people and resulted in direct economic losses of more than 500 billion yuan ($75 billion). He said 2010 was a freakish meteorological year for China, with severe weather hitting the country with a frequency and [...]
Global food crisis driven by extreme weather fueled by climate change
We’re in the midst of a global food crisis — the second in three years. World food prices hit a record in January, driven by huge increases in the prices of wheat, corn, sugar and oils. These soaring prices have had only a modest effect on U.S. inflation, which is still low by historical standards, [...]
Skyrocketing food prices fueled by unusual extreme weather provided spark for Tunisian revolution
In this surprising people power revolt that exploded in the new year, the usual recipe for an uprising was at play – fundamental underlying issues like repression, autocratic rule, corruption and growing unemployment. But the trigger or the immediate cause, significantly, was fuel and food, especially rising food prices. The rising food prices that shook [...]
India’s crops hit hard by climate change
A number of India’s key crops are experiencing the effects of climate change, experts say. H Pathak, an investigator with the Indian Agricultural Research Institute’s Climate Change Challenge Program, said global warming isn’t limited to a rise in average temperatures. “It’s a little more complicated than that. There is for example also a rise in [...]
Damage from super-cyclone Yasi sends sugar prices to record high
Sugar prices broke over a three-decade high Wednesday as one of the strongest cyclones to hit Australia in a century slammed into the sugar-producing nation’s already flood-ravaged Queensland coast. Raw-sugar futures for March delivery broke 36 cents a pound in InterContinental Exchange trade, the highest price since November 1980. White sugar on London’s Liffe exchange [...]
